tom leonard by lady in the radiator under a Creative Commons licence

People sometimes ask why the Scottish Poetry Library doesn’t provide events outside Edinburgh, and the answer is partly that there’s a lot of poetry going on around Scotland and we don’t need to step in; also that we don’t have local expertise and resources. But we’re delighted to be partners, as in this Saturday’s event at the Margins literary and musical festival at Glasgow’s Arches. Three Poets on 25 February sees three generations of Scottish poets brought together:  Tom Leonard, Don Paterson and William Letford, three vital voices.

Since the mid-1960s, Tom Leonard’s poetry has expanded and challenged our conception of poetry. His focus has remained relentlessly on language, specifically its politics, which are often implicit: Leonard’s poetry has acted as an x-ray, picking out the assumptions that underlie daily as well as official utterances. In his poem ‘Unrelated Incidents (3)’, he imagines a newscaster explaining why he reads the headlines in a RP accent: ‘if / a toktaboot / thi trooth / lik wanna yoo / scruff yi / widny thingk / it wuz troo.” On the page and on stage, Leonard is an extraordinary presence.

In much of his earlier work, Don Paterson combined Zen and a Calvinist inheritance (his grandfather was a United Free Church minister) with a contrasting interest in the carnal. His work is often marked by a Borgesian playfulness; ‘On Going To Meet A Zen Master In The Kyusha Mountains And Not Finding Him’, for example, was a blank page. Rain (2009), however, has a starker tone. ‘I was conscious that I was writing more directly,’ Paterson says. ‘I asked myself, why do I keep returning to Robert Frost? I tried to figure out what he was doing, and a lot of it is to do with that direct address.’

William Letford is a relative newcomer, yet his poetry already displays a sureness that belies his youth. His first collection, Bevel, will be published later this year by Carcanet. When not writing or performing, Letford works as a roofer, and it was there, amongst the beams and joists, you could say, he ‘self-published’: he wrote lines on the unfinished roofs, perhaps to be discovered one day in the far future. ‘People often comment on how different writing is from roofing, and they’re right, but what’s wrong with that?’ he asks. ‘I get to work outside, watch streets and towns from different angles and glimpse people’s lives through their back gardens. Plus, most of the time the only thing above me is the sky.’

Each poet performing on his own would be an event worth catching. The combination will make this an event you’d be sorry to miss – we look forward to seeing you there!

Category: festivals